


On Writing, Fanfiction and Soulmates

by gloriouswhisperstyphoon



Category: Meta - Fandom, No Fandom
Genre: Essays, Meta, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-26 18:12:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17750960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloriouswhisperstyphoon/pseuds/gloriouswhisperstyphoon
Summary: This is the first of a series of essays that I'd like to write on the subject of tropes seen within fanfiction. There's a lot of them, and I'm going to start off with discussing soulmates - the good, the bad, and the implications that most people don't seem to think of.So with that, here's an essay on the concept of soulmates and how it acts as a microcosm for fanfiction as a whole.





	On Writing, Fanfiction and Soulmates

This isn’t an attack on soulmates. 

I’m no stranger to this idea that it’s somehow either a good or bad thing that there is a matched pair for a person. And that’s a valid desire in life, the desire to have someone that knows you on a fundamental level that no one else can, the desire for a connection that goes beyond surface level, that you’re somehow  _ meant  _ to be with this person, in a way that no one else is. 

So this will be angry, yes, and it may contradict your own views on this topic, but I think that in the name of discourse, it’s important to just recognise that there is room for improvement and that there is room for growth for all writers. 

The obsession that has emerged in fanfiction about the concept of relationships has given rise to the trope of soulmates and the idea that two characters, in need of a plot, must fall in love. I find this view to be somewhat reductive and ignore the issues that I’ve seen raised about fanfiction and the ability to accept any form of literary criticism.

That being said, this essay is going to break down the ideas around soulmates and the very real and very valid criticisms that have been made on it, varying from personal ideas and the spectre of abuse within such relationships. 

So let’s break it down.

  
  
  


**What the Hell is a Soulmate Anyway?**

The premise of soulmate fiction revolves around the notion that all humans are fundamentally matched and that there is tangible proof of that match whether by magical tattoos, or visions, telepathy or any other of a thousand different methods that writers have interpreted it. 

But the heart of the matter is this: people are fundamentally incomplete, and the only thing that completes them is another person that they have a divinely ordained connection with. 

However, there’s a few things that we need to clear up first:

  
  


1\. On the realities of being single

Full disclaimer: I am currently single.

Painfully, disastrously so. 

And I find it liberating. 

I have no one to answer to, save for myself, I don’t spare any emotional energy on anyone that I don’t personally consider a friend, and I find it truly sublime, for lack of a better term.

On the surface, this doesn’t seem like a particularly relevant point, but it’s important for the writers of soulmate fiction to truly interrogate what a world populated solely by people who have been somehow matched by the Great Cosmic Yenta would truly look like.

Would there any room for someone like myself, who finds fulfilment in friendship and not romance?

Somehow, I doubt it. 

But we’ll delve deeper into that later. 

  
  
  


2\. On the realities of knowing someone.

It’s impossible to just know someone, simply deep in your soul, upon meeting them.

Oh no, it’s perfectly possible to see someone that’s walking by and feel the first, heady rush of desire. 

But that’s desire and nothing much more than that. 

It’s impossible, as these stories claim, to find someone and have an instantaneous and profound connection that is soul-deep (a concept that I myself, as a scientist, promise not to interrogate or to rant about too much), no matter how much people convince themselves that they have one with their own partner. 

And that’s something that we’ll also have to delve into if we’re going to cover this in any sufficient depth. 

  
  


3\. On the realities of change.

People change.

Oh my god, what a cliche that phrase is. 

But just because it’s a cliche doesn’t make it necessarily true. 

And it’s an important thing to acknowledge!

People change and you have to appreciate that, and interrogate their motives for  _ wanting _ change and it’s something that everyone in a relationship that lasts longer than, say, a week, needs to acknowledge.

And that’s another reason that I’m not comfortable with this idea. 

People change, and the reductive nature of a soulmate relationship doesn’t give a person particularly much ground  _ to _ change, because the match (God, isn’t that a concept. The Match, as if it’s like medicine’s infamous Match Day) might happen when you’re a naive twenty year old and be expected to last two score and ten, until you’re being put into the ground for the last time.

How does a relationship grow and change without the emotional rationale to even do so?

If you’re already perfectly matched, where is the impetus to change?

If you change, even for the better, is that will make you unmatched?

And that’s something that we’ll have to cover. 

  
  
  


4\. On the realities of abuse.

Another disclaimer: In my professional life, I work as part of the medical staff on a mental health unit of a major teaching hospital. 

Again, this doesn’t necessarily seem like something highly relevant, but I think it’s important to delve into the reasons that the concept of soulmates ultimately doesn’t jive particularly well with me, and it’s important to give context for those reasons.

The main reason that I mention my professional life is that I have a front-row seat to the realities of abuse as they exist in our modern day. 

Modern day health professionals are trained to look for any signs of domestic abuse in the Emergency Room (or the ED, as I’m going to refer to it), particularly in women. 

And this is an important and touchy topic that we’re going to have to get stuck right the hell into, because domestic violence is both a very powerful precursor to true, actual, horrific violence and also a deeply under-reported statistic, even with medical professionals standing guard over all women coming to the ED with injuries suggestive of it. 

It goes deeper than that, it is an emotional and sexual topic as much as it is a medical issue, and this is important because soulmates can be a slippery slope into justifying abuse.

And that’s something that is going to have to be acknowledged. 

And with that? Let’s get started. 

  
  
  
  


**Loneliness as a Virtue.**

Again, like I’ve said above, I’m single. 

I find it quite happy, but at the end of the day, it’s a major point when you’re discussing the concept of a soulmate and the love of your life. 

So let’s just start there. 

A single, blanket statement: I’m single. 

And it’s an oft overlooked point in soulmate fiction.

What happens to the single people?

And more than that, what happens to the asexuals, the aromantics, the people on the LGBT+ spectrum that might not necessarily want a relationship? If the greatest discrimination already falls on LGBT+ people, how does any world with  soulmates truly interrogate the complexities and the nuances of a relationship that people might not necessarily want?

And what about the people on the other end that identify as polyamorous, the ones that don’t want to be simply locked into having one person that you spend the rest of your life with?

Are we to be the ones left behind in the name of romance?

Is this how modernity marches on?

In the form of a dystopia where what is discriminated against is not those of different race, or migration status or wealth, but where people are discriminated against based on the relationship setting on their Facebook feed?

And to a certain extent, that sort of thing already occurs, whether it be through holiday bookings being cheaper for couples, the commodification of things like Valentine’s Day and anniversaries and the truly exorbitant amounts that people are expected to shell out for weddings, all of which is another way to show how our culture is obsessed with relationships. 

But how bad would it truly be in a world where the Great Cosmic Card Dealer had reached down and said, rather than ‘fiat lux’, ‘And Now Shall Christina Be Matched with Albert’?

And this matching system isn’t going to be something we’re getting too deep into, given that I don’t want this to be a screed against soulmate fiction.

But the question still remains: What discrimination would exist against single people in a world populated by ‘romantically’ (I assume it’s romantic, because as someone who once read a lot of it, almost all of it was romantic) linked soulmates?

And more importantly, how would society shift to accommodate this?   


I assume that people would be matched across cultures (if not, that’s another fault-line I’m not even going to tiptoe near) and across countries and generally be a global, cosmopolitan match. So in that case, how would society even function?

How do you even start to world-build a society in which this occurs?

Do you make it a thinly veiled allegory for discrimination in the modern world?

On that note, I defer to the far-more talented Ta Nehisi Coates, whose review of  _ Crash _ , a movie which revolves around the lazy use of allegory called it ‘the apotheosis of a kind of unthinking, incurious, nihilistic, multiculturalism’. And that’s a similar approach to how I see any attempt to discuss nuance in soulmate fiction as it currently stands. 

So we've seen that it doesn't work on either a personal or a societal level in terms of fiction writing. 

So what level do these stories work on?

And to that, we must turn to:  
  
  


 

**What Is Love (Baby Don’t Hurt Me)**

To discuss love, or relationships, in any sort of detail, we have a distinct need to define which type of love that we’re looking at. 

So the main forms of love that exist in literary criticism:

  
  


Philia

This is a form of virtuous (according to Aristotle) and pure love between two friends of equal standing in life. It often is translated as brotherly love. 

  
  


Eros

This is the sort of all-consuming romantic love that generally is the one referred to in soulmate fiction, or at the very least, almost all fanfiction. 

However, according to Plato, it has its own virtues. He described it as a way to contemplate the ‘beauty within a person’ and does not define the concept of physical attraction as being part of love, hence the term ‘Platonic’. 

  
  


Agape

Thomas Aquinas describes this form of love as ‘the love felt to will the good of another’. For lack of a better translation, this essentially means the feelings that one would feel for a child or a spouse. Interestingly enough, a common translation is ‘love feast’. 

  
  


Storge

This is the final form of love and this is a major one that tends to get overlooked. This is a sort of overwhelming tenderness or affection for humanity.   
  


 

Now, why was it important to explain these concepts?

I wanted to have these noted down because it’s an important thing to remember: there is no one, overwhelming definition for love, and it’s a point that’s often missed. 

In nearly  46730  stories (at the time of writing) labelled with the tag ‘Soulmates’ on the Archive of Our Own, there are far less that describe platonic love, and even those that attempt to interrogate those ideas can't conclusively build an accurate representation of a society in which a defining characteristic of a person is who they are fated to be in a relationship with. 

A person as a whole will feel love for all sorts of people, not just a single person, and these loves will define who they are and who they will become. 

Which brings us to another point.

  
  
  
  


**What Does It Mean To Actually Know Someone?**

As someone much smarter than me once said: “temet nosce”.

That is, an exultation to “know thyself”, the phrase that was once inscribed on the doorway to the Oracle at Delphi, the prophetess. And there's something at the heart of that: what does it truly mean to know oneself, and more importantly, how does your view of yourself and others get shaped in a world defined by soulmates?

Let's put this in medical terms. Or at the very least, with Freudian psychology: a person's identity is shaped by three components: the ego, the id and the superego. 

All of these coalesce to form a concrete personal identity shaped on your own thoughts and how you, as a person, fit into your perception of the world?

And how does this shift if we add the additional component of a soulmate to this? 

If a person's worth and identity are innately shaped by the knowledge that there is someone out there who is the other half of you, how does that work?

For those that have lost your  _ soulmate _ , how does that work? Do you live with the deep, soul-shattering knowledge that you have lost the only person that could ever understand you on such a level?

Or even for those who have no had the opportunity to meet their soulmate? How would something like that work? Would they live the rest of their days knowing that they will never be considered whole by any conception of that word?

If we define a person's identity, much as Jung did, as the collection of choices that a person had made up until that point (everything from what to eat that morning up to where a person chooses to live), how does a person define themselves when one of the most important choices has already been taken from them?

That is, the concept of free will cannot exist in a world where someone has already been fated to be the person you are destined the spend the rest of your life with.

Let's examine the common subtypes of soulmate fiction through this lens, then. 

  
  
  


Tattoos

This is probably the most common example of the trope and possibly the most egregious. 

For those that are not aware of the nature of this, it consists of a tattoo either appearing on a person's skin, possibly at the date of the other person’s birth or  _ from _ the birth of the tattooed individual. The tattoo itself might consist of the other person’s name, an arbitrary symbol that matches on the other person, or any other of the myriad ways that fanfiction authors have interpreted this.

In essence, this issue boils down to two things: the nature of identity and what it means to have free will.

Abraham Maslow stated that freedom is not only possible, but necessary if we are to function as human beings, with the ability to carry out self-actualisation what divides humans from other animals. 

However, the concept of free will as it exists in philosophy is a murky concept at best, so let’s dive into the most commonly described idea about identity and the role that choice plays in it. 

Soft determinism is a fusion between the ideas of free will (where people have absolute control over their destinies and choices) and determinism (where the diktats of fate, environment and behaviour mean that our paths have already been predetermined). Instead, this theory takes the approach that our behaviour and identity are shaped by a mix of our own choices and both biological and environmental pressure. 

So why go into this?

And why go into such depth with the idea of identity through the lens of a soulmate fanfiction trope?

The answer to both is simple: Because it needed to be done. 

To properly interrogate the idea of what it would be like to exist in a world where someone had had one of the most important choices a person could make taken out of their control, it is important to understand what it means for a person to, as Blake put it ‘hold infinity in the palm of their hand’.

So let’s go even deeper into this, then. 

What does it mean to have a personal identity in a world where a match has already been made for you?

So, if we agree that identity has been partially shaped by personal beliefs and choices and partially by biological and environmental pressure, what form would that take?

Let’s take a common example for most Asian people living in the West: code switching.

For those that are unaware of what this means, it essentially boils down to the idea that fully accepting one’s cultural identity and norms, such as having an Asian name, will disadvantage oneself in professional and personal life, so the choice is made to do things such as adopt a Western first name and attempt to soften one’s accent. 

So why are we discussing this?

We’re discussing this because it’s important within the confines of a trope.

If a name is written on another person’s skin, what does it mean that the name is in English or in, say, Khmer?

How does it shape or shatter an identity?

If someone has identified as Khmer all their life but their English name is written on the skin of their other half, how would that destroy their concept of personal identity?

And for someone who identifies as a trans person, how traumatic would it be to have their deadname on someone else’s skin?

But before anyone puts a complaint in, let’s quickly run through a list of subversions that have been identified on the Archive of Our Own tag. All of these play on the idea of misunderstandings as a fun method to get the couple together, which, again, is not a knock against soulmate fiction. 

  
  


Nicknames : 

This can refer to superhero names, vigilante names or even just a nickname that the person goes by, which avoids the devils of code-switching, but opens up another can of words. 

How would the system know about their choice to become someone else, or to use another nickname?

But this is the least egregious of examples.

  
  


Race Specific Markers:

This is a trope that is more commonly identified in the world of Lord of the Rings, simply owing to the depth of knowledge about the various races in this fandom. 

However, there are very few stories that actually play with this idea in its whole, instead choosing only to have the awkwardness of identifying someone by their race, rather than by their name, identity or what would attract a person. There are also very few that interrogate this in a contemporary setting beyond simple jokes about childbearing (of which there are many) or even just simply beyond racism.

 

 

Obscuring or Forced Removal of Soul Marks

This is one of the few tropes that properly is played with in its entirety, and on a reasonably common level, where it can become a defining aspect of a person’s character. 

The examination of the trauma inherent in losing a major aspect of one’s identity, which we have previously established as being fundamentally needing to be built around someone else, is a common subversion of the overall genre, and allows for a broad range of complexity. 

A notable group of fandoms where this idea is discussed commonly involve Fullmetal Alchemist, in which the main character has had much of his body replaced by prosthetics. Another one where it is less common, but well-examined is through the character of Jessica Jones, whose entire raison d’etre is that she is an abuse survivor who is uncertain of her own memories. 

Which brings us to another major point.

How would a major event like that change a person? 

And more importantly, if you’re matched with someone, how does change in a person even exist?

How can it even exist if you’re matched before you have the opportunity to grow into the relationship, to feel it out and stretch it and make it  _ yours _ and no one else’s?

So let’s talk about how people, and relationships, change.

  
  
  
  


**Lord Give Me The Strength To Accept The Things I Cannot Change**

It’s said that death, taxes and stupidity are the only constants in this world. I’m inclined to agree with that statement, but also add an additional component to that.

Change. 

There’s two components to this blanket idea of change as it pertains directly to this form of fiction: personal change and the inevitability of it.

So let’s tackle that first idea.

What does it mean to change as a person?

If we examine this through the lens of Jungian psychoanalysis, he states that there is only the ego, a circumferential idea which encapsulates the idea of the self and represents the bounds of human consciousness. 

He also believed in specific archetypes that shift and change, which defines the ego itself. There are twelve that are described, but the main ones that we’ll be concerned with here are:

  
  


The Persona

This is the face that a person will present to the world, which will, by necessity, vary by situation and the specific needs of that moment. It also exists to protect the self from the demands of the world, almost like an exoskeleton for the consciousness. 

  
  


The Shadow

This is the mechanism by which Jung talked about the supposedly ‘base’ instincts of one’s character, which encapsulates weaknesses, repressed ideas, desires, instincts and shortcomings. That is, all of the different little ways that we try to reshape ourselves to fit into the mores of society. 

  
  


The Anima/Animus

The term used refers to the opposite sex to the person being psychoanalysed. This represents the true self of a person, the heart of the whole ‘self’ and the truest form of their own identity. Jung also noted that this aspect of a person would, by necessity, change through the course of a person’s life according to biological and physiological urges, a point that we’ll delve into in due course. 

  
  


The Self

This is the last and the most powerful of the archetypes and it represents the collective consciousness of an individual.

 

So why would I explain this in such detail while trying to prove a point about individual identity?

The answer, as always, is simple. 

To be able to examine something’s shortcomings, we must have a depth of knowledge about the factors that are leading up to this point.

And the point that I am making is that our current conceptions about identity are based about the notion of a single person and their own ideas, not about how a person who is ‘bonded’ to someone else would function. 

How does one make a decision, knowing full well that a soulmate could be waiting for them just beyond the riverbend?

How does one decide which of their cultures is to take precedence in their lives, if at all, if they were not sure what the name on the other person’s skin was?

How is any choice made if you know that there is someone out there for you, but you don’t know how you would meet?

Determinism has a place in philosophical discourse, but even the most vigorous proponents of this idea acknowledge that humanity has a degree of choice and self-determination. 

And how does this fit?

It is an interesting conundrum, one that shatters the foundation of the world that we live in, and the ones that we create via the words we’ve used, and not an idea that I’ve ever seen discussed in any degree of depth.

The other aspect of change that needs to be discussed as part of this section is change within relationships.

We have already acknowledged that personal identity lays the foundations for a person to change and that it is impossible to formulate a sense of personal identity when your entire life is lived knowing that you are merely a half of a whole.

So let’s talk about that whole.

What does it mean to have a relationship that lasts any degree of time when you have had no proper opportunity to know the person and to understand who they are, and how their goals align?

I’ve heard it said that a relationship fails because what a person once saw as a person’s positive traits become character defects.

That is, that obstinate stubbornness that you once loved has become an unwillingness to acknowledge another’s point of view.

That the instinct to rush into something head first and dedicate anything into a goal becomes a childish impulsiveness with no place in a relationship.

My last relationship fell apart because my ambition were incompatible with those of my last ex and that is completely normal. You have to find someone that you want to face the world with, and an important part of that is realising that your goals have to be aligned. 

Sometimes one partner in the relationship is prepared to burn down the world to get where they want to go, and sometimes the other person wants to take their life easier. And that mismatch of ideas and goals tends to mark the end of a relationship. 

By that same token, as successful couple can then be acknowledged as one that understands the flaws of the other person and adapts to them, and adapts to the changes in their partner over time . It’s not a complex concept to understand - just imagine that first flush of love, that first date where you hide all your flaws and try to present a picture of ‘yourself, but better’, but slowly reveal the truth of your personality to the other person. 

It’s a slow process, a revelatory process and a transcendent process. 

So let’s discuss this in the concept of a soulmate relationship, then.

So if a person is bound to another and thrown together, with the knowledge that this relationship has been ordained, for lack of a better word, by a higher power, how does it shape your idea of a relationship and the common goals that bind a person together?

How do you stay with someone if you’re not even sure who or what they are?

Do you trap yourself in the personality of ‘myself, but better’ for years until you can let tiny fragments of yourself slip out, knowing full well that there’s a connection between the two of you that goes beyond just attraction and love and  _ agape _ ?

Is it like an arranged marriage, with the weight of societal expectations on your shoulders and the inability to escape should something go wrong?

Is there no way for a person to ever truly express their true self if the other person doesn’t want to see what they will grow into, as the relationship progresses and the situations that they exist in shift?

And how does society treat those with relationships that fall apart?

Like with the discussion of single people and those that choose not to pursue a relationship, any story that seeks to interrogate this idea must first come to grips with the stragglers in society, the ones that cannot be put into neat little boxes, the ones that are left behind, for lack of a better term. 

The base instinct of humanity is ostracism - ostracism of those that are different, that do not comfortably fit into the boxes that we have divided ourselves with. The boxes of race, culture and personal identity, as we have previously discussed, have no place within a worldview that encompasses a match with someone else. So in order to properly create an accurate representation of this world, the first thing to do must be to identify what the societal dividers are and how they are enforced, whether by law, by instinct or by common consensus. 

But this discussion of relationships that fail must bring us to the last and the most important point of this essay, and one that I was initially loath to bring up in the first place, simply because of the strong feelings that it can arouse. 

  
  


 

**I’m Not A Part Of Your System (Man)**

So, before we get into this discussion in any degree of depth, a few things need to be acknowledged: abuse, particularly, spousal abuse, is a terrible crime and a horrific act and one that should be reported to the necessary authorities.

To those that are abuse survivors, I acknowledge your suffering and should you not wish to read on, that is your prerogative. 

To the rest, this is a point that must be brought up and I will endeavour to do it as delicately as possible. 

Now that we’ve gotten the formalities out of the way, let’s talk about abuse and how it fits within the structure of a society based around the notion of an irrevocable bond between two individuals. And we’re going to do this with the copious use of statistics. 

There’s minimal research articles on the subject of soulmates (for obvious reasons), however, there is significant research on spousal abuse within societies that still practice arranged marriages, and this is to what I’ll be referring to here. 

Let’s put some statistics here to start this off. 

The World Health Organisation places the rate of spousal domestic abuse, as of 2014, at 4% - 54% based on statistics and studies from 11 different countries. 

We also need to define what is meant by ‘domestic abuse’. What is specifically being referred to in this case is “ any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life”, as stated by the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

This is not the only form of violence that will be discussed, as this definition also includes physical, emotional and economic violence. Of course, this definition is not strictly confined to women, as LGBT people are more likely to be the victims of domestic violence, and their cases are more likely to be both more violent and unsolved, as well as not acted on until it is too late. This isn’t to say that there is no violence against men in relationships, just that there is far less in the way of research on them. 

But for the time being, let’s focus on arranged marriages and how the numbers stack up. 

As seen in the Gokler, et al. study (2014), which looked at rates of domestic violence against women in Turkey, comparing them against the marital status and the type of marriage it was (arranged, mutual agreement, eloping), it can be seen that rates of violence against women are much higher when the marriage was initially by arrangement. This is confirmed by the Mahapatro et al (2012) study which looked at women in India, where the rates of domestic violence were two to three times higher in arranged marriages when compared to other forms of marriage. 

Other reasons for worsening the violence are the comparative educational level of the husband as well as the age difference. When there is a demonstrable age difference, there is a much higher level of domestic violence against the woman. 

These numbers are both horrific and representative of how an arrangement similar to the concept of soulmates could go terribly, irrevocably, and fatally wrong. 

So, let’s take this discussion away from the real world and the bland, black figures of numbers on a page to an analysis of why this is important for writers to take into account. 

What does this mean on a human level?

It means the battered woman in the ED, begging the attending doctor not to let her go home with her husband because she’ll be killed if she goes back. 

It means the hospital staff hiding the identity and location of the abused and terrified sixteen year old girl lying in a bed being watched over by the only female medical student because she is too afraid to talk to a man, while the staff conveniently lose her paperwork to buy the police time to finish their investigation. 

It means the women that are still kept in their forced marriages, the Sword of Damocles being held over their head in the form of their children, of their money, of their passports, whatever it might be. 

It means that any discussion of a situation where people are expected to be kept together forever, based on an arbitrary choice that throws together matched individuals, must take into account what it means when it goes horrifically wrong. 

If there’s no escape from the system, how are people supposed to navigate the intricacies of leaving this?

Another statistic that needs to be discussed is the higher rates of female suicide in societies that still maintain a patriarchal power structure, specifically in Afghanistan. Women commit suicide in Afghanistan at a rate approximately three to four times that of men, which is in stark contrast to the rest of the world, where the statistic is reversed.

So we must identify, as was discussed at the last conference on Suicidality and Mental Health, held in Japan earlier this year, what triggers made this situation worse for women as compared to men.

And the answer to this was the Taliban control of Afghanistan. 

This means that women have little recourse if they have any issues, that they are more likely to be accused of crimes that they have not committed and they can see the rest of the world pushing onwards with modernity, while the structures of the country have largely been unchanged by time. 

Again, the question will be asked: What use do I have for this admittedly disgusting statistic if I’m just writing a fanfiction where my two favourite characters are thrown together by the plot contrivance known as a soulbond?

My answer to this as the same as it has always been. A writer must understand the implications of what they are writing in order to tackle it in as much depth as it deserves. Someone writing a light romantic comedy based around a premise which can mask abuse and ostracism must understand what it means that they have chosen to tackle this topic in the first place. 

To write well, we must first understand the mechanics behind what we write and what happens when we ignore criticism about the negative implications of what has been written. 

A good example of this being played out the real world is from Guardians of the Galaxy 2, in which a recurring joke is the character Drax, who can only speak literally, calling the naive female character of Mantis ugly repeatedly. This is all setup for an eventual joke that she’s beautiful on the inside, but it misses the implications. 

James Gunn’s refusal to acknowledge the very valid criticisms by women that this situation plays the obsession with women’s beauty for a joke represent the very real dangers of something like this happening again.

What happens when we can’t acknowledge critiques by the very minority groups that have been affected by what we write?

We keep making the same mistakes.

What happens when we make the same mistakes repeatedly?

The mistake becomes entrenched as a trope.

What happens when the trope keeps coming up in the media we consume?

We internalise the message, whether it be ‘you’re ugly’ or ‘you need a partner to feel fulfilled in life’ or ‘your identity is based on who you fall in love with’ and we risk propagating that message even further in a brutal cycle. 

It’s a terrible thing, and I think that research and literary criticism about fanfiction is long overdue, just as a way for people to start to think about what they are actually writing in greater depth.

  
  
  


**What The Hell Does This Mean For Me?**

Nothing.

This doesn’t have to mean anything if you don’t want it to. 

That’s the heart of the issue. 

Nothing means anything unless people choose to act upon it.

And that’s what I’ve tried to do for the entirety of this essay, or, as my editor called it, a primordial nightmare with fancy language. 

So let’s make the point of this whole thing clear. 

This isn’t a knock against the very concept of soulmate fiction.

It isn’t a way for me to publically declare “I hate any sort of trope-based fanfiction” to the high heavens. 

This is just a way for me to try and articulate some of the very real issues that are brought up and rarely acknowledged in sufficient depth by fanfiction authors, especially when criticism of their idea is considered virtually anathema. 

And I think that this is the crux of the issue. If we can’t engage in meaningful discourse and criticism of each other’s ideas, there is no impetus to change. 

And given that, by virtue of the publication schedule, fanfiction is almost always at the vanguard of what is popular in modern media culture, it’s important to understand what appeals to people about it and talk about what it means on a greater scale. 

This essay is only one part of a greater whole. 

Soulmates are only one part of what is ignored and glossed over in the circles of fandom. 

There’s a thousand more things that I could cover, such as the romanticisation of huge age gaps between partners in a relationship, the fetishisation of non-consensual sex acts, the thousand tiny provocations that push things just too far. But I didn’t cover those things, because I want this to act as a starting point. 

Soulmates are an excellent idea to build off of, and the concept of a relationship in which you feel connected to your partner on a seemingly spiritual level is neither new nor something to be vilified. But it’s something that needs to be examined in more depth and thought of more carefully and that’s what I want to start. 

So I’m not advocating that people not write what they want to. Absolutely the opposite.

Write whatever you want, whenever you want.

Just think more carefully about what you write and when people tell you that you need to be careful about your idea, it’s worth taking a moment of time to listen to them, a far more difficult thing to do, rather than just type. 

Think about the implications of what you write about, listen to people who’ve been in those shoes before, take action to address those issues before they boil over and end with arguments and accusations being flung into the air. 

And that’s it. 

It’s not that complex. 

And who knows, maybe the story will wind up better than before. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> This essay was not written in a bubble. It's something that I've wanted to write for a very long time and it took a lot of effort to research, collate and write, as well as taking a long time to be ready enough to write this. 
> 
> So with that, there's a number of specific people to thank.
> 
> Llama: My wonderful beta reader, who coped with my endless rants and rage messages as I struggled to pull this together while also working. Your efforts to find me as many platonic fic examples as possible are acknowledged, along with the essays that you wrote to me about why they all sucked individually, and I'd like to offer you some chill. 
> 
> My actual work colleagues and university friends: If you're reading this, thank you for ignoring me every time that I hid in the break room to write this essay, went to the library and abused your computer access to research domestic violence and arranged marriage and your general excitement over the strange medical student who was writing an essay on fanfiction. You are truly appreciated and I'd also like to ask you not to make my account public. 
> 
> The NaNo Discord: Y'all know who you are. Thank you for being the inspiration and the drive to write this. From your discussions about Twilight babies to sending me as many fics as you could find examples of, to just helping encourage me, I thank you so much.


End file.
